“Yes, but that kind of fury, and what it demands of you, kills the soul.”
“It didn’t kill yours.”
Inside, she trembled. “I’m not sure about that.”
He released her hand and pulled her close, his arm around her shoulders. “I’m sure.”
Sliding her arm around his waist, she tipped her head against his shoulder. All she’d wanted since Fox first came into her life and she started awakening was to reclaim the fury, the coldness, to go back to the way she’d been. And she might be able to accomplish it. By killing Castin.
But for the first time, she began to realize that she would be giving up as much as she gained. The thought of losing this connection she’d begun to form with Fox cut like a well-honed blade.
A short while later, as they continued down the beach, Fox felt another low vibration. He and Melisande tensed as one, spinning to find more of the blue-faced warriors running toward them.
“There have to be more than two dozen of them,” Melisande gasped.
“That’s our cue to get the hell out of here.” A shiver tore through him, his gut offering up an escape route. He hoped. Into the trees. Now.
He grabbed Melisande’s hand. “Come on!”
Together, they ran for the tree line. Exactly how this would help them, he had no idea. If they ran through the forest and out the other side, what then?
A glance over his shoulder told him that the savages were coming across the sand quickly and fanning out. He and Melisande would have no choice but to go through the tropical forest unless they wanted to fight. And considering the savages’ primary goal appeared to be to strike down Melisande, there was no way in hell they were taking on two dozen of them at once. No way in bloody hell.
As he and Melisande leaped into the trees, they separated, dodging underbrush and fallen limbs and trunks.
“Stop!” Melisande yelled a short distance in front of him, grabbing a tree as if to hold on for dear life.
Fox managed to stop a moment before plowing into her. “What’s the matter?” He grabbed her hand, pulling her back against him.
“Another pit.”
Sure enough, palm fronds lay across the tropical forest floor, obscuring all but one corner of what indeed appeared to be another pit. But as he looked around, he found palm fronds everywhere, most appearing as carefully laid as the one in front of him.
“It’s a minefield,” he muttered. And his gut had led him right to it. He couldn’t even think what that meant, because wasn’t it his gut that had led him down that street in the seaport, right into the path of the vines?
Melisande started forward, and he grabbed her arm. “What are you doing?”
“It’s either this or fight.”
“Okay. You’re right. We go forward.”
This was the reason they were here—to fall into one of these traps just as Castin likely had. To be captured by the Mage, Melisande almost certainly slaughtered.
He wasn’t going to let it happen.
Chapter Thirteen
Melisande’s heart pounded as she stared at the pits hidden beneath the palm fronds all around them. The storm should have sent the fronds flying, unveiling all of the holes. But the magic appeared to have restored them to their original place, if it had ever moved them at all.
“Run, Mel,” Fox said urgently. “They’re here. Run.”
Stars in heaven. There had to be paths, but the way the palm fronds overlapped, it was impossible to see where. She began to lift the huge leaves, tossing them into the nearest pit, revealing the holes, one by one. The trouble was, bending, lifting, shoving the fronds down took time. And with two dozen warriors racing to cut out their hearts, there was no time.
She prayed to the ancient queens and leaped forward, grabbing one of the long fronds and slamming down the hard stem over and over, walking as fast as she could. Where she hit solid ground, she followed. Where the frond pushed through, she exposed another hole.
At the clash of metal behind her, she whirled to find Fox fully engaged in battle. The only good news was that the savages would be as hindered by the pits as they were. And maybe the pits were the key, the way to even the numbers a little. After a few more yards straight back, she made a hard right. Just as she suspected, with Fox no longer running interference, the painted ones began racing straight for her. Two hit the first pit and fell in with twin cries of fury.
Melisande grinned and kept going. Another three leaped for her and landed in the next pit. Death cries echoed through the tropical woods as Fox made kills behind her. Two more savages leaped to fall in. They certainly weren’t the smartest lot. Then again, they weren’t real.
She’d sent seven of them into the holes so far. A quick look over her shoulder told her that Fox had killed close to that many, too, leaving . . . ten. Still far too many. But another one cried out. Nine. And another. Eight. Fox was hacking through them quickly, following after the horde that stalked her, taking them out from behind. Seven, six, five.
Suddenly, three of them turned, like puppets pulled by a single string and leaped at Fox all at once. In a coordinated, horrifying move, they tackled him, pushing him into the nearest hole and following him down.
“Fox!” She sprang forward, but one of the two remaining warriors stepped into her path and the other came at her from the other side until she was trapped between them on a strip of ground no more than two feet wide. If she fell in either direction, she, too, would be trapped in one of those pits. And she had little doubt that she’d never leave it alive.
Her only choice was to fight.
Melisande hesitated for only a moment, then lunged. Fear and desperation fueling her actions, she fought for her life and for the life of the man she was coming to care about far too much. She ducked, stabbed, whirled, until sweat ran into her eyes, and her tunic was torn and bloody. But, finally, she managed to hamstring one of her assailants, toppling him into one of the pits. Then she whirled and slashed the other’s throat.
With a shuddering breath, she wiped her bloody blades on her ruined tunic and slammed them into their scabbards, then lunged for the pit where Fox had disappeared. But between her first step and her second, the tropical forest disappeared.
And suddenly she stood in the middle of an empty, snowy plain, at the base of a rocky, frozen hillside. No. She turned, trying to return to the island, and failed. There was no going back. And Fox was trapped.
The labyrinth had separated them at last.
It was late afternoon when Grizz and Lepard knocked on the front door of the tan-and-brown two-story frame house in Whitefish, Montana. It sat along a quiet neighborhood street, its front porch overflowing with plants and flowers, in the midst of which sat a padded bench adorned with a fat, sleeping tabby.
In the distance rose the mountains, the Rockies, their snow-covered crowns at odds with the warmth of the late-spring day.
A man opened the door, light brown hair falling straight and shaggy to his shoulders, his beard full and thick. Paint splattered his white T-shirt and jeans and a glass of what appeared to be whiskey sat comfortably in his free hand.
“Yarren Brinlin?” Grizz asked.
Small eyes narrowed. “Who wants to know?”
Grizz pushed his way into the house, startling a squeak of objection from the smaller man.
“Hey! What do you think you’re doing?”
Grizz stopped in the middle of the front room and looked around at what was essentially an art studio—two easels with half-painted canvases, a stack of blank canvases propped against one wall. Paints of every conceivable type and color littered every surface. The house smelled of oil paints and paint thinner, with an underlying layer of cigarette smoke and microwaved pizza.
“Get the hell out of my house!”
Grizz’s temper ignited, his fangs and claws erupting in a hard growl.Brinlin gaped, his eyes going wide as dinner plates, his whiskey glass slipping through his fingers to shatter on the paint-splattered hardwood floor. “You’re a Feral Warrior.”
Grizz felt Lepard’s hand on his shoulder. “Dial it back, Grizz.”
Wide eyes went impossibly wider. “The grizzly? Man alive.” His gaze swung to Lepard. “You, too?”
“Snow leopard.”
Brinlin took a shaky step backward. “What . . . what do you want?”
“Sabine.”
The male’s anger-flushed cheeks drained of all color. “No. No way. She’ll kill you if you try to go near her. Or she’ll kill me.”
“She doesn’t like Ferals?”
“She doesn’t like anybody. She’s a loner.”
“We need to talk to her,” Grizz told him.
Brinlin backed up another step. “I can’t help you.”
Grizz matched his step, stalking him. “Give me her address.”
“I don’t know it.” The smaller man glanced behind him, unable to back up any farther for the stack of blank canvases behind his heel. “She probably doesn’t even have one. She lives in the fuckin’ middle of nowhere.”
Grizz took another step, until less than a foot separated them, his muscles tense, his patience gone. At seven-foot-two, he towered over the other man and used every bit of that height advantage to intimidate. “Then you’ll take us to her.”
“No! I mean . . . look.” Brinlin visibly swallowed, sweat beginning to glisten on his temples, his gaze darting everywhere but Grizz’s face. “There’s a lockbox in the woods where I deliver supplies to her once a month and pick up her list for next month. That’s it. I never see her.”
“When do you deliver the drop-offs?”
“The first of each month.”
Which was still four days away. He couldn’t wait four days. He was already running out of patience. “Tell us how to reach the drop box.”
“I . . .” He swallowed. “She’ll kill me.”
Grizz’s fangs and claws erupted. “It’s either her or me,” he growled.
The man paled so quickly, Grizz thought he was going to pass out. “Are you going to hurt her?”
“We just need her help.”
Despite his obvious shaking, Brinlin scoffed. “Good luck with that. The only time I ever met her, she pulled a shotgun on me.”
“Yet you continue to take her supplies?”
“Providing for Sabine has been my clan’s responsibility for as long as anyone can remember. Centuries. Probably longer. She’s a loner, like I said. Where she goes, someone in my line follows . . . at a distance. My father was out here first, nearly a hundred years. But he got eaten by a grizzly, and I moved out here to take his place.”
“I was told she’s Mage. Why is a Therian clan providing for a Mage?”
“She’s not Mage. Well, maybe she’s part Mage. I don’t know. And I don’t know how the promise to bring her supplies started. It’s just something we’ve always done.”
Grizz felt his claws and fangs retract. He had no control over their comings and goings and wondered if he ever would. “You’re going to give me directions to that drop box,” he said calmly. “Or I’m going to rip out your liver.”
The man blanched. “You can’t tell her how you found her. You can’t implicate me.”
“Directions.”
Brinlin took an unsteady breath. “Right.” He peered at Grizz doubtfully. “How well do you know this area?”
“Not at all. Print me out a map.”
Another shuddering breath. “Okay.”
As Brinlin scurried to his laptop, Lepard asked, “What does she look like? Sabine.”
“Dark hair, reddish. Pale skin. Pretty, I think, but it was hard to tell since she was watching me through the sights of a gun.”
Ten minutes later, map in hand, Grizz and Lepard climbed back into their rental vehicle and left.
“The woman sounds like a real charmer,” Lepard commented.
“Maybe. Or maybe she’s just being defensive.”
“What do you mean?”
“The Indian said she can see into a man’s soul. Sounds like some kind of empath to me.”
Lepard’s mouth opened. A thoughtful moment later, he muttered, “Maybe she senses things about people, and can’t turn it off . . .”
“Which would account for her need to protect her solitude, with a gun if necessary.”
“Can you imagine the loneliness of that kind of life?”
“I’m thinking more of the kind of welcome we’re likely to get. And the chances she’ll accompany us willingly to Feral House.”
Lepard snorted. “Like negative forty? And I thought this mission had failure written all over it. Try goat fuck. In great big neon caps. There’s no way in hell this is going to work. On either end.”
“Probably not. But we don’t have a lot to lose at this point.”
“Considering that the original Ferals are going to wind up killing us either way?” Lepard gave a humorless laugh. “We are one hundred percent fucked.”
Snow was falling lightly, the air frigid, as Melisande looked around, searching for a more defensible position. Because the damned labyrinth would almost certainly send someone to try to kill her again.
Or some thing.
She didn’t have long to wonder what. Minutes later, the sound of pounding hooves had her turning and staring in rising horror at the beast charging at her from across the snowy plain. The size of a bull, it had a doglike snout with wicked teeth and a thick greenish gray hide. But it was the horns on its head that were scaring her shitless—not two, as a bull would have, but a crown of six, long and narrow, like six short swords ready to cut her into steaks.